Crippin’ Jim Crow: Disability, Dis-Location, and the School-to-Prison Pipeline

Abstract

This chapter describes the removal of marked bodies from public generative spaces, such as schools, to restrictive spaces of isolation, violence, and shame, such as prisons. I argue that it is urgent to deploy a more complex analysis of these removals that have brutal consequences not only for those “removed” but also for the possibility of imagining a more inclusive radical transformational politics. The title of this chapter “Crippin’ Jim Crow” references the historical practice of legalized removal via separation that was extended to an entire society based on the social category of race as theorized in contemporary analyses in Critical Race Theory and that I now bring to bear on a more recent analytic, “crippin’” from the relatively younger field of Critical Disability Studies. “Crippin’” according to disability studies’ scholar Robert McRuer (2006) refers, in part, to critical analytic practices that explore how “cultures of ability/disability are conceived, materialized, spatialized, and populated … [within] geographies of uneven development [and] are mapped onto bodies marked by differences of race, class, gender and ability” (72). In referencing the term “crippin,’” McRuer also marks its coincidental association with the Los Angeles-based street gang Crips, whose members often become disabled as a result of gang violence and who are often also confined in incarcerated spaces like prisons. As such, the title of this chapter, “Crippin’ Jim Crow” marks the transhistorical confluence of the legacy of plantation slavery and Jim Crow with the more contemporary violence of mass incarceration to foreground a complex intersectional politics of race, class, and disability where incarcerated bodies become profitable commodities in the neoliberal prison-industrial-complex of late capitalism.